The Janeites

In the plain, there are too many people.

There are too many little roads which bump into one another. Because of this too many cars had also bumped into one another, and the Authority had spent a great deal of money making
roundabouts
: there were too many of these. Likewise signposts, pointing to places. Our dear Alsace; Oberhausbergen and Niederhausbergen (which nobody can ever find.) Well, in England they’ve a Nether Wallop and a Middle Wallop. Ray turned the car to the right anyhow; it was time to climb out of this dense world.

Fields began to slope, and there were vines on them. Ray’s spirits rose with the road: fresher air up here and there were hills in front of him. It was a fine autumn day and the grapes needed all the sun they could get. He had been told to ‘look for the castle’: the road made a kink and there was the castle, across a valley and perched up on the scarp; charming remnant of a robber baron’s fortress.

He came to the village and this was good, too. Not picturesque enough to be a tourist attraction, but some shapely old houses, and a Renaissance fountain for horses to drink from, and a pretty church early enough to be pre-Gothic. There was also a thirteenth-century old man smoking a pipe and sunning himself on a doorstep. His attitude said that labouring in the vineyard was for others.

“Perhaps you know William Barton?” The sun was hot: the old gentleman wore a leather jacket buttoned up to the neck, and woolly carpet-slippers, and a woolly cap of equally violent check, with a pompom. The countrymen no longer wear berets much.

“Ouais.”

“You could tell me the way?” There was a bit of wondering whether this information were not too precious to part with.

“
Ouais
.”
Took the pipe to point with. It wasn’t even complicated.

That way was the Château but a ways before that you turn, see, and there’s a track going up, quite steep and doesn’t go anywhere but it takes you there. Which it did too. Sharp up, and round some well-cared-for vines, and there was a gate, and a house built on the steepest of the meadow. Spectacular view, much like that of the castle further along – monarch of all it surveys – of the vineyards and the valley further down and the plain beyond, across to distant hills and the sunlight playing on the whole. Clouds were blowing up from the west. Ray had been wondering why this William lived in such an out-of-the-way corner; the situation explained some things. Modern house, quite big; splendid terrace on the far side, overhanging the drop. Plenty of room for garden (planned but nothing much done yet) and below that a drystone wall and the big sweep of vines. All this had cost a lot of money.

A big man answered the door; tall and broad, with the look of the athlete: large open face, handsome, and smooth brown hair.

“Apologies; I was looking for Mr Barton.”

“Found him, too. Man selling, due for disappointment.”

“Psst – they’re giving it away.”

“So they can’t get rid of it. Even up here it’s what I don’t want.”

“Name of Marquis help at all?”

“You voting for him or he voting for you?”

“Said that Bill’s the man to see.”

“Now tell me what he really said.”

“Said you were a thorough swine. Now would you like to give something for the widows and the orphans?” The meaningless citified talk – Ray is used to that, can do it too. He got a slow smile.

“You better come in, it’s wet on the doorstep. You like a beer?”

“Place like this and there’s no champagne?”

“Siddown where I can see you. Now tell me. Cop you’re not, so who are you?”

“Name of Ray, I’m just a friend.”

“Of the Marquis; a real close friend. And he told you, Bill was eager to get enrolled?”

“No, I only like girls.”

“And you’ve come all the way from Paris, talk the language and everything.”

“Yes, a clever little dick; I’m a Jesuit.”

“Good christ, you’re a curé.”

“They’ve threatened me with that a time or two – told them I wouldn’t be good at it.”

“That Marquis, I’ll eat his balls.”

“Better not, he might need them.”

“A Jesuit – ho, a hard man. Intellectual.”

“Got a hard God – otherwise no more than you.”

“What are you doing out here?”

“William – silly question. What are you doing? Scratching your arse.”

“That’s right, I’m retired. Cruise liner, deckchair, swimming-pool here inna basement.”

“No future in that. Chess, gardening, give you an interest. Green Party maybe, for when the nuclear power goes critical.”

“You sit there, while I get the champagne.” It was a strange room, well designed but oddly bare. Some bits of nice furniture, clean but it didn’t look lived in.

“Take hold, curé. Here’s to us, salud y pesetas.”

“You listen, now. I ran across the Marquis, he tells me ol’ Bill, here in this house, writing notices saying Achtung Minen! and sticking them round the shop. Asks me to look him up, he’s a nice chap. I plod out here in the bushes, you call me Curé.”

“I’m suspicious by nature. And by training. Sit outside here with the shotgun across the knee like Duke Mantee. What do you want – to convert me?”

“No no no, I’ve got more respect for you than that. Tickets for the prayer-meeting I don’t have. Be a Buddhist or a Moonie I don’t care. But planted there, saying Fuck You, I’m fireproof – that gets up my nose. You ain’t. You’re crossing the road, comes some prick on a motorbike, you’re in a little trolley, where’s my legs. Man, the holy
nuns are looking after people like you, cup of tisane and a pill at bedtime.” William filled both glasses, drank his off, meditated.

“I got a cancer, Marky tell you that?”

“He did; I’m not just a Jesuit, I’m a doctor. At that, pretty good.”

“Curé – I’ll call you Ray, okay? I’m planning to be what they call a Stoic.”

“No bad idea. Be a bit of an Epicure too, maybe, let’s not disdain pleasures?”

“My wife left me; was that on the news too? I didn’t take very kindly to getting all these items in a row, either.”

“Let’s be serious.” Ray reached for the bottle to see what was left. “I’m no great expert on wives, myself I haven’t any. The crab is a tricky animal, there I’m something of an expert; we play chess together. You’re a young man and an athlete, mentally you feel defeated; that gives him an unfair advantage. Sit moping in the corner, that’s like giving him a pawn. You tell me who diagnosed you, what treatment he prescribed, I can look up all the technical dossier, think about a ploy. I win these games as often as not. Upon that note, let’s go out and have lunch; there are some goodish places as they tell me. If I may say so you’re looking like a fellow who opens a tin of baked beans.”

“Whirl of bloody gaiety, are you?” siad William getting up.

“I don’t have a consulting room. Work at the research institute. So a restaurant is as good a place as any, for listening to stories. While picking at the piece of fish… A Porsche, yet. I come visiting in a tin can, drive away in this.”

“Yes; where I come from we were pretty well paid.”

In the business, Dr Valdez is also widely known as Boogie Acetoso. These comics from Argentina (reading matter in research institutes will often startle the innocent onlooker) are violent – for sure – and vulgar, very: so after all is the crab. In Spanish ‘El Accitoso’ – the greasy one – could be rendered pedantically as ‘nobody gets a grip on him’. Ray is no Superman but like Boogie he has a talent for winning. In the research world, where they seek to get a grip on the crab, he is not thought of as an unusual technician. The Oncology people
hold him in respect because he has a talent betimes thought uncanny: he can often outguess them when the crab – a champion at this game – looks to be winning. In plain terms he has brought off spectacular results, exercising ‘alternative medicine’: a sniffy phrase which ‘school-doctors’ often pronounce, and they mean it pejoratively.

Dr Valdez drove home thinking, to be quite honest, about cars: the little Renault Four had been greatly beloved and so, in his wilder youth, had been his Deux Chevaux: did one really want a Porsche? The Jesuits might think it funny and just as likely they might not. There are doctors who would giggle and think ‘typical Ray’ – the present number being a Beetle many years old.

Upon the whole, and with regret, a temptation which had to be resisted. The thing would be stolen within a week. Temptations do get resisted; some do anyhow. Jokes are made about casuistry, about being jesuitical. Dr Valdez is however the real thing, no mummery about that. The Society is and always has been eminent in the sciences and there is nothing in the least extraordinary about Raymond Valdez. Questions remain unanswered: to be a doctor is a help, in being a Jesuit? One dislikes the word ‘help’; a coloured, a loaded, almost a partisan word. It might be fair to say ‘contributes’. But turn the question round: being a Jesuit quite unambiguously helps towards being a good doctor. Such things aren’t in the least unheard-of. Believer and unbeliever frequent the altars of research institutes. Ray might instance Jacques Arnould ‘who does space studies’, adding rather naughtily ‘Of course, he’s a Dominican’. Unbelief, disbelief? One can refuse atheism but that’s no barrier to being anticlerical.